Cazuela – Free Premium WordPress Theme

You take several ribs, maybe a chicken, some potatoes, a piece of pumpkin, add a couple of exotic spices and you have it – a delicious dish called Cazuela. Now, if this is not the recipe you have hoped for, let me give you a different one, for a premium WordPress theme this time:

WordPress best practices throughout

Flexibility

5 different template flavors

Beautiful fonts

11 color schemes

9 widget areas for you to throw in some of your stuff, like banners, ads, calls to action, AdSense

Responsiveness, so it looks good no matter the lens size

Retina ready, so it looks sharp no matter the dioptry

Translation ready

And yes, it’s free as it gets. If you’d like to try it now, you can head over to Theme Cazuela page, but if you’re still far from being persuaded to try something different, let me have another go.

WordPress Best Practices

Best practices is what every WordPress product should embrace, especially those on ThemeForest. It would make life so much easier for all developers and users. It is something we’re passionate about and you can read all about it on our philosophy page.

Compatible with the likes of other WordPress plugins also made in accordance with WordPress.org codex

Compatible with future WordPress releases

If you haven’t skipped reading what best practices mean for a WordPress product, I’m sure it’ll become the main feature you’ll look for in your future purchases.

Moving on to Theme Customizer, something that should replace all those nasty looking theme options panels.

Theme Customizer

Theme Cazuela utilizes native Theme Customizer and not custom theme options panel that you find in so many premium WordPress themes today.

Theme Customizer allows you to tweak your theme’s settings and see a preview of those changes in real time. It’s been introduced in WordPress version 3.4, so make sure your WordPress installation is compatible with Cazuela, before activating the theme.

Responsive & Retina Ready

It’s become a standard feature in all premium WordPress themes and it’s an SEO friendly solution – responsive layout means you don’t have two of the same websites (standard and mobile) for different screen-sizes and it is what search engines like these days.

In addition to being responsive, Cazuela WordPress theme is also retina ready, which means it’ll look sharp in any screen resolution.

Widget Areas

9 widget areas Cazuela offers, give you the control you need to insert content and widgets where ever you need them.

There are 3 main widget areas:

Primary Sidebar

Secondary Sidebar

Footer Widget Area

Most people will use these three, but some will have the need for inserting banners, AdSense ads, calls-to-action and other content and have more control over positioning.

In addition to this you control 6 more widget areas:

Before Header

After header

Before Content

After Content

Before Footer

After Footer

And that’s not all. Cazuela has one Homepage widget area below all your content where you can insert three widgets per row in unlimited number of rows. This widget area is used in Widgetized Homepage template. You can see it in action on the Cazuela demo page.

Other Features

You’ve seen just a glimpse of our free, premium WordPress theme, but the post is getting long, so I’ll try to squeeze in the rest.

Page layouts

You have an option of 2 page layout types:

Boxed

Full width

And 6 page layouts:

One column layout

Two column layout – right sidebar

Two column layout – left sidebar

Three column layout – 2 right sidebars

Three column layout – 2 left sidebars

Three column layout – left primary sidebar, right secondary sidebar

Each one can be set site-wide, in Theme Customizer, or for individual posts or pages.

Masonry page template

We know Pinterest has become huge in the last couple of years, so we created masonry (Pinterest-like) page template, which can be a nice, refreshing way of presenting your posts.

It stacks your content in a dynamic layout grid. You can choose categories which to include and number of posts per page in the Options custom field.

Authors template

For all of you who have active blogs and lots of blog contributors, you’ll find authors template useful. Authors template allows you to show sortable list of subscribers, contributors, authors, editors and administrators.

You can order authors by display name or post count, display them in ascending or descending order and select which roles you’d like to display.

Theme hooks

Something developers will appreciate. Cazuela enables you, using theme hooks, to easily create child themes, customize and further extend functionality of the theme. You can read more about Cazuela Theme Hooks on the theme demo page.

Cazuela theme is a very versatile WordPress product that can easily and quickly be turned into something your online business needs. With so many different color schemes, page templates, layouts and other premium stuff, it’s not that difficult to customize it to your liking.

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41 Thoughts to “Cazuela – Free Premium WordPress Theme”

First and foremost, this theme is a beast. I still can believe the number of widget areas and the amazing default layouts. An option to get some of that header real estate back would be great (wordmark, nav and maybe search on the same line). How about a sidebar option to the masonry page?
Cheers!

You mean a more compact header, right? We’ll discuss that one internally.

Wouldn’t a sidebar make Masonry page too narrow? I tried it with a sidebar, it looked odd at the time, but no reason not to introduce an option for it and allow users to choose from full-width page or one with a sidebar. Thanks for suggesting this.

Thank you for considering my suggestions…yes, you’re exactly right, a more compact header, sort of like what you have on this very page. As for the sidebar on the masonry page, I was definitely thinking of a full browser width scenario, else I agree, it would look odd.
Thanks again for the great theme.

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for! Was almost ready to throw out WordPress altogether and build html sites. Thank you very much for making this theme available and for having the philosophy you have.

Dragan, is there any way to use my existing header on this theme? It’s just that these colors have been with me for over a decade and traders have come to associate them with my site. You can see it here on the disclaimer page: http://www.supportandresistance.com/risk.html Other than that, this theme is perfect, I love it.

My header is a transparent image on top of a background image. I guess upload the header in the header panel…does Cazuela allow a custom background image along the top only? Sorry for the dumb questions, I’m not very knowledgeable about building websites! I really do appreciate the help.

First of all: I like Cazuela very much. So much that I immediately downloaded the theme and started to play around with it.
I am trying to make it work but as I am fairly new to wordpress I haven’t succeed making flexslider work. Do you have any tutorials on just how to do that and other stuff that may be challenging for a newbie?

To make slider work you need to use proper page template (Homepage with Slider). Then, any images you attach to the page will be added to slider. No need to insert them into the page itself, you just need to upload them using Add Media button while you’re editing the page.

I have problem with using the slider. Image in the slider becomes blurred. The example in the picture on the link – http://alona.com.ua/sample.jpg. At the top is the original image, at the bottom – a screenshot of the slider. I use image as is, no crop , no resize or scale. Could this be the problem of the slider or something I’m doing wrong?

1. When you say slider, are you using a) slider plugin or are you using b) Cazuela’s “homepage with slider” template?

2. Cazuela is using native WordPress functions, so when it comes to cropping images it’s all WordPress and not the theme. Is size of your image smaller than the area it needs to fill, so WordPress resizes it?

I use “homepage with slider” template. Size of image is exacly fit the area. I try some other images – result is the same – blurred image. When i add image to page with default template or to the post – there is no problem.

I was wondering, how do you change the background color of the navigational menu that appears under the header? I thought it was .main-navigation, but that doesn’t stretch all the way across the screen (it’s padded). I tried adding a different background image in .scheme-blue.header-gradient #masthead which worked in all browsers except internet explorer. Any suggestions for this newbie? Thanks.

Hi guys, I use ‘post categories’ to group related posts together and I was wondering if there’s a way to display only portions of each post on the category pages (featured images and titles only would best, but a snippet of the content could be ok too..) as opposed to the default behavior of displaying posts in their entirety.
And just a thought…it would be fun to see how people are customizing Cazuela…maybe you can get a gallery started.

Thanks for your wonderful theme, it’s very complete! One question:
how do I change the layout to 1 column so the sidebar isn’t shown anymore? I tried to do this in the theme customizer under Layout, but I can’t change it there. Thanks for your help!

Thanks for your quick reply. I do see the option in the page editor but like in the theme customizer I’m not able to change it. When I put my indicicator on it the Arrow changes into a hand, telling me I can select this option, but once I click it nothing happens…